Joe Hallett commentary: An ink-stained, 42-year adventure draws to a close

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Sunday January 19, 2014 9:51 AM

Time marches on.

And it’s marching past me.

So I need to slow it down, squeeze it for all it’s worth and get what I can from what’s left of
it.

That means no more deadlines, no more missed dinners, no more campaigns, no more politicians and
no more columns.

That means time to do something else, time to
really think about other things, time to write the novel that’s rattled around my head for
35 years, time for
two fishing trips a year, time to spend with my grandson, the new joy of my life.

That means retirement.

Back on May 15, 1972, a lifetime ago, I never imagined this column. My first day as a reporter
for the
Fulton County Expositor in Wauseon, my beloved hometown, hardly portended 42 years of
newspapering. But I quickly felt the passion and realized that being an ink-stained wretch was my
destiny, a dream fulfilled under three storied mastheads —
The Blade in Toledo,
The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and, for the past 15 years,
The Dispatch.

Along the way, there have been more than 7,000 bylines on stories, too many of which I scarcely
remember covering and writing.

There have been interviews with the likes of Bear Bryant, Woody Hayes, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the
Bishop of Prague, the last four presidents, including George W. Bush aboard Air Force One,
astronauts and ship captains, criminals and law enforcers, the rich and the impoverished, and
countless everyday people.

In the early ’80s, I chronicled the plight of Toledo’s homeless by becoming one of them for a
week. Nearly two decades later, I recorded the unfathomable sorrow in Lower Manhattan after the
9/11 attack and during five subsequent anniversary visits.

I covered the last five Ohio governors and the legislators who served with them. None ever
became a friend, but that’s OK because we were friendly. Respect, evenhandedness and a clear
understanding of roles will get you four decades in this business.

I remember being ordered by legendary Gov. James A. Rhodes to choke down Dutch loaf aboard his
campaign bus and being browbeaten behind closed doors by six of the seven Ohio Supreme Court
justices, demanding in vain that I name a source.

Two weeks after my posting to Columbus by
The Blade, I cut my teeth as a Statehouse reporter by boarding a plane with Gov. Richard
F. Celeste on the day in 1985 that he closed 71 savings-and-loans to stem the biggest run on
deposits since the Great Depression.

I watched the Tall Ships sail into New York Harbor while covering Jimmy Carter’s convention in
1976, chronicled the acceptance speeches of more than a half-dozen presidential nominees at
subsequent conventions, traversed the presidential battleground states on two “Real People Tours,”
spent two weeks in Florida for the recount after the overtime 2000 presidential election, and came
to know firsthand from four caucuses that there are more hogs than people in Iowa.

I lay on the deck of the USS George Washington and gazed at a Persian Gulf sky ablaze with
stars, took cover from rocket attacks while covering Ohio troops in Iraq, peered through binoculars
at North Korea across a 38th parallel laden with landmines, covered killer floods in Nicaragua and
indescribable poverty in Haiti, and filed stories from China, Australia and Eastern Europe.

As a middling-minded farm-town boy, I never imagined this adventure — shared for 42 years with
my best friend and wife, Marie.

There is much I will miss, including these Sunday visits with you.

Mostly, though, I will miss the company of my incredibly talented colleagues. They are public
servants in the truest sense for the noble work they do. The newsroom of a newspaper is an
inspiring family environment.

I can’t believe I got paid to do this stuff. It sure beat working for a living.